Thursday, September 24, 2015

This is how much time it took me to consume this book by Michiel Maandag.

How I got it?

The author Michiel is an ex-colleague of mine and we met again after 16 (!) years. We agreed to trade his book against a cucumber from my glass-house. How Dutch & cool is that?

Why am I Excited about this Book?

I can think of three quick reasons:

Because Michiel produces a Dutch and Direct View on Branding, in a ‘Jip and Janneke’ way (Dutch for an extreme simple method to digest serious topics) and I recognise every word he writes. And I did read all 150+ pages in less than 30 minutes.

I don’t particularly like Consultants (consider Brand Advisors one of them). Yet Michiel manages to produce a top quality book all by himself. With so much value that I dare to endorse his book to every start-up entrepreneur with serious plans.

The book makes me think and glue certain aspects in my mind as an entrepreneur. It also inspires me to think further than my current horizon.

Ready to Read?

I can borrow it to you if you mail me, or go here to purchase: http://www.theonlybrandbook.com/#get_it

Obviously I expect an equally good review on the cucumber I gave to Michiel ;-)

Friday, November 14, 2014

A Dutch organisation by the name Vektis recently published an open-data file showing the costs that healthcare insurers have paid in 2012. With this data set, Vektis aims to help stake holders gain a better understanding with the ultimate goal to improve quality and cost of #healthcare.

Dutch RTL Nieuws analysed the raw data and published several articles about this (link, in dutch) and aired it on their prime time TV news last night.

So did I, but from a different angle:

Vektis raw data reveals 56 men, aged 76, within the dutch city of Lelystad who expensed 2,002.29 euro for cost of maternity and obstetric healthcare. Can we conclude that 76 year old men in Lelystad expense an average of 35,76 euro for pregnancy?

I don’t think so.

The raw data of Vektis contains 40 records where male people have submitted expense reports for maternity and obstetric care, totalling 20,627 euro.

The data does not show how many expense reports were filed, nor by how many people. Therefore we have to be very very careful to draw conclusions.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Clarification for Information Leakage: A trusted US business partner of mine asked me for assistance. He needed help in identifying the source of a potential information leak for one of his customers.

As everyone knows, the behaviour of regular business users is rather predictable. This predictability can be visualised and wrapped in a bubble allowing for granular and non-granular analysis.

With the image below, I created a non-granular view where each bubble represents a user's normal interactions. Even with a casual glance you can immediately see how one bubble stands out from the others.

This visualization provides clear evidence of one individual who had accessed the contents of more than 2,500 mail files of other employees in the organisation.

In greater detail, each bubble in the above image represents a single user who accesses a particular number of databases. Each type of database is given a designated color, described in the legend. The entire visualization represents the activity of 5,000 users inside the organization's IBM Domino collaboration environment.Some of you may have noticed the second largest bubble (in the blue bubbles). This represents the activity by a well-known performance monitoring tool.
A forensics engagement like this typically takes about one to two weeks to perform with a lead time < 24 hours. All of the work is performed remotely, with the exception of the data collection (online screen sharing session, appr. 1 hour) and presentation of findings (again online screen sharing session).